


a liminal space, a world between worlds

by hypraeteia



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Episode IX, F/M, Fix It Fic, Mortis (Star Wars), No Rey Palpatine, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Post-TRoS, Resurrection, Reylo HEA, World Between Worlds, i take some stuff from the Mortis arc, orpheus and eurydice vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:08:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21894877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypraeteia/pseuds/hypraeteia
Summary: Out beyond right, out beyond wrong, there is a place. I will meet you there.Maybe the barren-ness of Tatooine was fitting. She herself had been devoid of life once. Sometimes her body felt colonized by it like this planet had been.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 113
Kudos: 900
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics, The Rise of Skywalker: Fix-It Fic Edition





	1. Chapter 1

“Be with me.”

Like she had so many months ago, Rey levitated off the ground a few feet, balancing whatever small objects she could find on Tatooine. Her choices were not as rich as those on Yavin IV; she carefully lifted broken hydro-compressors and loose metal scraps in the delicate web of the Force that she was weaving around her. 

This required a level of focus that was challenging, but nothing she was a stranger to. She knew that she could reach that trance-like state that was necessary, but she had been unable to for the past several weeks, increasingly bothered by the fact that her attempts so far had been unsuccessful. 

She felt a furrow start to develop between her eyebrows. 

“ _Be_ with me.” 

But they weren’t. Or more specifically, _he_ wasn’t.

Ben wasn’t.

The objects levitating around her slowly collapsed from her ministrations, and Rey was left feeling helpless. She had seen Master Luke nearly a dozen times since Ben had become one with the Force, but Ben himself hadn’t deigned to visit her once.

That she knew of. She wasn’t sure if her dreams were real. In any case, they didn’t feel like it - so hazily happy that she was certain they were only moments that could exist outside of the material world. Although she had felt it before, once, just slipping out of the cold sleep of death. 

She felt tears brimming in her eyes along with the familiar heat of something warm and heady in her throat. 

And then guilt. 

She was so _angry_ with him. And she didn’t feel the right to be. 

Ben had made a choice, one that she knew was selfless and all light and so _Ben_ that she felt like it was a betrayal to not honor it. But she was so _lonely_. The break in their bond felt like a physical wound, a limb taken from her, the ache always fresh and the phantom appendage both present and so absent all at once. 

The tears spilled over, staining her cheeks and taking some of the caked beige sand on her cheeks with it. 

BB-8 beeped sympathetically at her, and Rey hastily scrubbed her cheeks with her palms. 

“Yes, I’ll get it eventually,” she sniffed. 

She stumbled her way back to the house with tears still obfuscating her field of vision, but managed to blink them back by the time she jumped down into the atrium that connected the living quarters. 

It had taken Rey weeks to get the moisture farm operational again. Even still, it was only self-sustaining, barely churning out enough water from the air for her to be able to drink, cook, and bathe. 

Thankfully she was no stranger to the careful rationing. 

It had been more difficult to find other necessities. She wasn’t familiar with the flora or fauna here, and so she had started to rely on credits sent from the Resistance and regular trips to Tosche Station. It had felt like a luxury at first, one that she didn’t deserve, spending credits on rations and veg-meat that she had to resist the urge to hoard. 

She was not quite back on Jakku. She wasn’t quite as alone in the world. But sometimes she felt like it. 

After enough trips she had surveilled enough stalls with fresh, home cooked delicacies to puzzle out what was safe to eat here. Despite Tatooine's remoteness, most of the residents spoke basic. A few dialects were unfamiliar to her, but she was mostly able to comprehend anything the traders or farmers spoke, and they brusquely fielded her questions about the ecology. 

_No, there aren’t any plants here._

_Yes, you can eat the scurriers._

_Don’t try and hunt the krayt dragons._

_If you’re desperate, you can find a womp rat._

Mostly, she had survived off of dried eopie, whose meat was gamey and tough, but plentiful. This planet was far more devoid of life than Jakku, which at least hosted seasonal desert blooms and shrubs. 

Maybe the barren-ness of Tatooine was fitting. She herself had been devoid of life once. Sometimes her body felt colonized by it like this planet had been. 

She ate from her stash of eopie as she planned her last few hours of daylight. The drop in temperature at night was severe, as was the increase in air moisture, and so much of the energy generators yield went to keeping her sleeping quarters warm and hydro-converters operational. 

She couldn’t bring herself to meditate again, so she reached for the dried cover of the most recent Jedi text she had started to study.

The weather here suited the texts. Ahch-To and Yavin were both far too moist for preservation, and the pages had started to feel too alive there, the texture of human skin, mortal and decaying. 

Here, they were frozen. 

The page she had left off at mostly consisted of a series of spheres arranged in between branching lines that felt reminiscent of the trees on Yavin. The scrawling text between the circles indicated a less literal depiction: not leaves but worlds, timelines, states of being. On the left side of the page, the script labeled it the _Chain Worlds Theorem_ , and a different script written on the right used _Vergence Scatter_. The following pages contained geometric stencils, lines so delicate they were almost fading, which she couldn’t quite decipher. They could have been some primitive depiction of hyperlane routes, or rather just a proof. 

She stared at the pages for a long time, not quite reading them. It was quiet here, like this. But underneath the void was the hushed hum of the Force, gently prodding like the first time she had gone to Ahch-To - the first time she had seen the texts. 

And like that time, she heard Luke behind her. 

“Rey?”

She turned her torso, glancing over her shoulder rather than getting up from her position on the floor. Luke looked younger this time, more corporeal. She wondered if this was intentional. 

“Why are you still _here_?” He sounded vaguely offended by her choice.

She remained silent for a moment, still feeling a pull to the page. 

“It’s where I should be, now.” 

He was silent, and so she fully turned to face him. 

“I came to give you and Leia peace.” 

He searched her face for a moment. His expression seemed knowing to her, but carefully concealing the fact. 

“We’ve been at peace.” 

Again, that familiar anger returned.

“Since Ben is with you?” Her tone was accusatory, searching. Perhaps, to someone who knew her well, pleading. 

Master Luke did know her well, and he was silent. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, now clearly desperate. “I just don’t understand. I don’t mean to be selfish. Not when-” her throat nearly closes.

“Not when he wasn’t,” Luke finished. 

She nods silently. 

“You’ll see him in time,” he says. But Rey thinks he sounds unsure. He intends to comfort, but in truth, she’s terrified. 

This life has to be temporary. On Jakku, the hope of her loneliness’ perpetual brevity was the only thing that had kept her sane. 

They would come any day now.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow they would come. 

She didn’t think she could last on this desert planet without that promise. 

Luke slipped away without her registering his absence. 

***

That night, she saw him again. He’s perpetually tired like this, eyes blurry, his breath deep and low, brushing against her bare shoulder or neck as they lay in her cot on Tatooine that is too small for them both. 

The first few times, she turned to face him so quickly that he had let out groans of complaint as she pulled at his arm or pushed his chest in desperation to see him, to touch his face, to feel his heart beat. 

Now she was becoming less sure it was real. Looking at him sometimes hurt too much. Tonight, she sat and counted his breaths, felt his heartbeat between her shoulder blades, noticed the tension in his arm when she shifted. 

“Ben?” She whispered. She winced as she said it, sounding too uncertain. Who else could it be?

“Hmmm?” She could feel the rumble of his affirmation. It was too real for her, so heartbreakingly perfect that she briefly believed she would do anything for this to be real. For it to remain after she wakes. 

Every dark side vision paled in comparison. 

“Why haven’t you visited me?” 

She felt his nose brush her ear, the puffs of his breath still steady.

“I’m here now, aren’t I?”

***

When she woke, she was freezing. The twin suns had yet to fully rise, the crescents of pink and white just barely peeking out from the horizon and scattering fractured rays through the haze of sand and heat. 

She remained under the woven standard-issue blanket from the _Falcon_ until the suns were fully exposed, quickly warming the homestead. 

She immediately checked the vaporators and condensers for the night’s yield, which seemed like it would be enough to last her the day. 

She transferred most of the yield in the condenser to her canteen, returning the valve quickly so as to avoid losing any moisture from the vaporator. She suspected the rest will either be condensed or lost to the heat by noon. 

She felt too restless to meditate, the twin suns already starting to make her feel smothered. She needed to move, to distract. She suddenly missed her training courses at Yavin, being able to leap and maneuver. Even on Jakku, she had the old destroyers. She settled for hunting, which would draw her to the dunes to the north. If she’s lucky, she might be able to catch some scurriers. 

The breeze on her speeder felt delicious, the only reprieve from the desert’s heat that she could find. The air was oppressively dry, and her skin had gotten increasingly more brown and leathery. It feels too vain to buy oil at Tosche, but she rationalized that without it the skin of her fingers and lips would probably soon crack. At least if she spends too much time on her speeder, at any rate. 

It doesn’t take long for her to reach the soft crests of dunes on the horizon. They’re so familiar to her, so much like the dunes of Jakku, but she felt like she was seeing them with new eyes. 

They look so still now. 

But weren’t they always? 

She jumped from her speeder, palming her lightsaber at her side, but decided to hunt with the electro-bow she had taken from the Resistance base. 

She vaguely felt like the dunes should swallow her. She was reminded of waves, waves she had never seen in the life she had lived on Jakku. Waves of water. She saw the dunes with fresh eyes, now.

Her calves started to familiarly burn after a while, the loose sand making the efforts of climbing the slopes twice as difficult.

Eventually, she started to use the Force to keep the sand beneath her compacted, which let her slip into a semi-meditative state. She lost track of time as she moved, but eventually she noticed the thin telltale tracks of scurriers in the sand, crossing one another’s threads of footwork between the dunes.

Rey begun to make quick work of the trek, her strides becoming longer as she focused on the path ahead of her. 

As she got further out, the wind picked up and the tracks start to fade. The sand had become flat again, dunes behind her now. The sand still retained its looseness though, and the wind whipped it into her eyes and nose as she squinted ahead of her. 

As she stepped forward, her brow furrowed deeper. The wind picked up further, the sand started to sting, and she wondered how strong the sand storms here could get.

If they were like what the Jakku natives called the breath of Ri’ia, she likely wouldn’t make it back. 

The tracks in the sand had disappeared, but when she glanced back towards the dunes she could see their disjointed threads.

It was like they suddenly disappeared. 

And then the ground began to move. 

It wasn’t like the sinking fields. Rey was familiar with that slow, engulfing funeral march by now. This sand was moving unpredictably, sinking and swelling at random, pushing and pulling her body chaotically. 

She managed to swallow her fear until a fin emerged from the nearest swell, along with a low groan that she knew belonged to something utterly _massive._

When she turned to run, the sand swallowed her whole. 

***

This was not death. She had known that particular emptiness before. 

There was too much here. Even before she opened her eyes, the sound of it was overwhelming. 

Whispers, everywhere. 

_It isn’t too late- Come back!- No, it was Snoke…- I’ll come back for you, sweetheart- My son is alive.- Rey!- What will you see if I do?- It’s too late, she’s gone._

It was overwhelming, cacophonous. 

And underneath it, waves. 

She opened her eyes, startled. Everything around her was so familiar and strange, all at once. At one moment she was sprawled in the agora of the star destroyer on Jakku, and the other the atrium on Star-Killer Base- then the wreck of the Death Star, waves crashing into empty hallways. They blurred together, shifting waves on Star-Killer, moaning hulls of the Death Star covered in sand. The only thing tangible - the only common thread - were the vertical series of doors and hallways stretching impossibly high. 

There seemed like there was no horizon. 

She stood, and then nearly fell. 

Because Ben was there, in front of her, behind the nearest passageway. Real and alive, and seemingly oblivious to her presence. 

His face was bare, and he still had his scar.

“Ben?” Her voice sounded so similar once, standing in a burning throne room, not sure who she addressed.

He didn’t respond, staring ahead at something obscured from her view. 

As she stepped through the doorway, she saw his mouth move in a whisper, or prayer. She couldn’t decipher it.

“Ben!” 

He turned to her, startled. 

She could see the blood drain from his face, his eyes widen in confusion. 

“Rey?”

It was the desperation in his voice that made her collapse into him without properly examining her new surroundings. 

She was groping at his clothing in an attempt to somehow pull him closer, perhaps to subsume him, by the time she managed to notice that her fingers were wrapped around the quilted tunic he had worn as a Knight. 

Forcing herself to notice this suddenly made everything else abruptly clear. They were in his old quarters, the one he had inhabited as Supreme Leader. 

The ship that had been destroyed. The life he had left behind.

Her heart sank. She was not in the present, and the brief promise of a future with Ben was slipping away again.

Ben stood in a stoney mixture of reverence and disbelief, and behind her was the burnt helmet of his grandfather. 

“I’ll do whatever you ask.”

He was pleading. But not with her. 

With a shadow. With the dark side. 

She was what was promised.

“Ben, no! I-” 

And then it all collapsed, the walls of his quarters suddenly sand, swallowing her again. 

***

When she sputtered out of her erstwhile grave on Tatooine, she felt like she had no strength left. 

But she managed, somehow, to stand up and stumble her way back to her speeder. Tears stained her cheeks again, but this time merely from the sand.

She felt hollow inside, too tired to cry. 

For a moment, their bond had felt whole again. It was still angry and raw, just as it had been during those months when she struggled to shut him out, but Ben had been _alive._

She didn’t know what was more painful, having him as Ben in her dreams, or alive as that dark shadow of himself. 

Perhaps she didn’t have to settle for either. 

When she returned to the homestead, she opened the text again, feeling very much alive.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been blown away by the feedback to this. Happy to keep this project up!
> 
> This fic draws from the Mortis arc from the Clone Wars and from Rebels with mention of the world between worlds. I'm intentionally writing this in a way so that it doesn't matter if you've seen these! Just let it be known that they're there for background lore.

She had never read with such desperation. 

Not even when she was pouring over Imperial manuals on Jakku, scouring for hints as to where she could discover a stray phi-inverted lateral stabilizer or control pulse emitter that would keep her alive in the desert. 

No physical need compared to this. 

She puzzled out the theorems within the Aionomica in the first few hours, taking notes occasionally with BB-8’s dictation system. 

There were a lot of proofs missing. The first, which also happened to be the most sound by Rey’s limited analysis, was written in script too ancient for full translation. The language seemed to be lost to time, some combination of basic with roots in the Chrelythiumn system’s lolling script. Even with her gift for languages, it was elusive. 

The mathematics though, were more clear, timeless and concrete; there existed a place, an in-between, that connected the past, present, and future like the Force connected life itself. 

Everything else seemed like gibberish. To her frustration, there were no concrete directions on how to reach it. More modern excerpts written in familiar aurebesh by Master Ri-Lee Howell rambled on comparisons to the realm of Mortis, hypothesizing on the entry’s script comparisons and non-voluntary entrance. 

She trembled slightly as she turned the pages. She was afraid that the script was right, that she had to rely on the Force to bring Ben back, to take Rey back to that place. And for perhaps the first time in her life, she felt like she couldn’t trust their fate in the Force.

Was this what darkness was?

Was she afraid of that too? 

Perhaps she needed to meditate. 

Emptying her mind was a struggle, but focusing on her breath helped. She could feel herself start to drift towards the fear again and again, but was usually able to catch herself.

_What if she could never go back to that place?_

Breathe.

_Would she even be able to bring him back?_

Breathe.

_Would he recognize the selfish person she had become?_

Breathe, just breathe. 

Her limbs started to incrementally relax as her consciousness slipped deeper into that void state she associated with deep meditation. She started to feel heavy, submerged under the weight of the Force, buried under the weight of her helplessness. 

At first, she resisted surrendering to it. It felt like betraying some deep or essential part of herself, like intentionally drowning, walking into a churning ocean. Abandoning her urge to _survive_ , to fight. But eventually it felt like a pull; sinking began to feel like floating. 

And then, silence. 

Water. 

It was soft this time though, lapping instead of churning. 

When she opened her eyes, she was beneath Ahch-To, facing the mirror she had searched for answers. She had Ben Solo to confide in, then. Now, she was alone. 

And that is who she saw in the mirror; not an infinite array of Reys, stretching into infinity, but only herself, breathing. 

Her reflection looked back at herself with hesitancy, questioning. 

Rey was startled when her other half spoke. 

“You’re not the same as I.” 

It was not her own voice. She could only barely place the vague sense of _otherness_ that she embodied. This was not the same as facing herself on the Death Star. This Rey was curious, vulnerable, unthreatening. 

There was no trace of darkness in her. 

“No,” she agreed, certain for the first time in months. She didn’t know that she could be light like that again. 

The other Rey tilted her head, astute. Her skin looked slightly pearly, too luminous to be human. But she wore the same clothing, even displayed the same scars. 

“But you are not like _him_ either.”

Her heart leapt in her throat. “Like Ben?”

The woman who looked like her merely studied her in silence, her features increasingly impassive. It seemed like life itself was judging her, and she couldn’t help but feel she was found wanting.

“Yes,” her reflection finally replied. “And...no.” 

Rey’s mouth had barely opened in reply before the woman turned to her side, addressing nothing, seemingly in answer to Rey’s unasked question.

And the man who appeared behind the glass was not Ben. She could pick out the differences with more ease than her differences with the woman who was not herself. 

His features were all the same, inky waves that fell to his shoulders and a twisted, teasing mouth that pouted as he observed her. Yet Ben had never _felt_ this way, even when she had first met him on Takodana. His presence was all darkness: arrogant and otherworldly. The coldness he brought was the chill that she felt in death. 

He was a stranger to her. 

“Who is _this_?” He only addressed her reflection, as if he could not deign to recognize something so inferior: the Rey that rested in front of them. 

Rey’s reflection seemed at ease, even brighter with the shadow of a man for comparison. 

“She has darkness in her,” she observed, for his benefit, her eyes not leaving Rey’s. Her voice was clinical, studious. Like Rey was a puzzle she expected him to solve. 

Something about their ease with each other unsettled Rey. They were opposites in every way. Perhaps it was their un-humanness that produced their familiarity. 

Both pairs of eyes judged her with a callousness, but the observation of the man who was not Ben was knowing. He looked like he would devour her where she sat. 

“So _lonely_ ,“ his voice was momentarily Ben’s, and tears began to fall. “At night, desperate to sleep, you imagine an ocean...” 

His voice became that terrifying unfamiliarity once again. “Your loneliness has made you selfish.” 

And then he recognized something inside her head, suddenly just as curious as Rey’s counterpart behind the glass. 

“Unlike me,” he crooned, surprised. 

“You are _not_ Ben,” she hissed, tears still falling. 

He didn’t reply to her, lingering in his disbelief. The woman who looked like Rey lifted her hand to the glass, still as dark and perpetually deep as it had been the first time on Ahch-To. It passed through easily, and pressed against her cheek. 

“Where is your love now, Rey? Where is Ben?”

*** 

She tumbled out of the vision with a gasp, relying on seconds of sputtering to get her bearings. She remained where she had settled to meditate, BB-8 puttering helpfully in the living room with the homestead’s main energy capacitor. 

The domesticity of it was in stark contrast to the whirlwind of her vision. The twin suns were already beginning to settle into the dusky horizon, painting the dunes in shades of apricot and mauve. She must have been meditating for quite some time; it was only noon when she had started studying the Aionomica. 

She took several steadying breaths before approaching BB-8, who seemed oblivious to her unease. To her delight, the capacitor yield reported higher energy levels than the previous night, which meant that she would spend less of the evening shivering in bed. 

With the last of her daylight hours, she managed to devour some of the rations she had stored in the utility closet, along with the last of the eopie. She would hunt again tomorrow. In any case, she had enough rations to last her a few days before she got desperate enough to send a holo to the Resistance. 

She couldn’t feel regretful that her hunt that morning had been unsuccessful; she had found something far more important instead. 

***

She had begun to feel like she was waking inside of her dreams. 

There was always a moment of rest, of nothingness, before she was aware of Ben beside her. Like always, he roused slowly, gradually becoming aware of her presence. 

It never seemed like a shock to him. As if it was natural that she should be sleeping at his side.

It always shook the life from her. 

This time she turned to face him, desperate to see his features after her encounter with his earlier imposter. And there he was; the familiar slope of his nose, eyes drowsy with sleep, the fan of his eyelashes brushing cheekbones scattered with moles. 

She nearly sobbed in relief.

“Ben?” She cried, shaking him. 

Her alarm seemed to register in his drowsy state, and he perched himself on his forearms, peering down at her with bleary eyes. 

“What is it?” His hands drifted over her in confusion, as if checking for injuries. This was the most alert she had seen him like this, in her dreams. 

“Ben, where are you?” She thinks the fear in her voice sounds a little pathetic. For a moment, she wished she could take it back. It felt like she was shattering the illusion that this was not the happy life they were living, that they were not together after all.

Ben, at least, was not as concerned as she. His forehead creased in mild confusion before he rolled on top of her, pressing lazy kisses down the column of her throat, sloppy and familiar. 

When he looked up at her, he seemed overwhelmed by the novelty of it. Was this really the first time they had touched like this?

“You brought me here,” he murmured, his lips pressed against her once more. “Come find me.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Would you like to lie with your soul in the grave?_

The red stain of her old training ribbon in the sand of Tatooine looked hauntingly alive. Nearly any tone contrasted with the sterile beige, but that woven cotton reminded her unnervingly of blood. 

It was solid and stark. Like time, apparently. 

Rey had sprawled underneath the _Falcon_ to study the Aionomica after a morning of blindly executing her routes of maintenance. First, the hydro-compressors. Then, the capacitors. Scan the horizon for Jawas. The dry wind had brought the ribbon out to her as she studied the second legible theorem. 

Like the first proof, she did not know if it was a comfort. 

The lines of script were as stern as its implication; time was one, cohesive system. You could move, you could alter, but what _will_ happen, already has. 

So Ben had really seen her, then. That time she interrupted his prayer. It was not some parallel world, or a vision. She began to feel that small grain of hope that had kept her alive of Jakku for so long. She prayed this time it was not misplaced. 

Like that girl on Jakku, she would have to wait. 

Luke was loitering near the entrance to the homestead when she returned, twin suns beginning to beat down mercilessly in the early afternoon heat. Each time he appeared, he looked increasingly more corporeal, the blue sheen around him dimming with every successive visit. Still, she felt like he haunted this place. His posture was hunched slightly, his features nostalgic. This was the place that he was young, once. 

He looked startled to see her, a relic of a time he was not inhabiting. “Rey,” he said with surprise, as if it took him a moment to recognize her. 

She dug her staff into the sand with what she hoped was a threatening finality. She schooled her features into something she hoped was certain. 

“You need to tell me if Ben is with you.” The specificity of the calm vehemence in her tone surprised even her. She thought she sounded strong, impervious, like his response did not have the power to vaporize her hope like water on this dead planet. 

Luke, for the first time since he was alive, looked genuinely uncertain. Not of the answer, but of his choice to reveal it. 

“No.” He finally managed, resigned. The exhaustion in his voice also carried the creeping precariousness she associated with fear. 

Luke perhaps did not get the reaction he so clearly anticipated. The breath that Rey took in response felt like the first in months. She had not known that she was drowning. But the unrelentless despondency of a life alone was suddenly lifted, and she emerged from it like a near-drowned-man, deprived of oxygen. 

“I think I know where he is,” she managed, clutching her staff like it would hold her weight. “I think I can bring him back.” 

***  
Luke listened silently as Rey fumbled with the Aionomica, flipping through the pages and stammering as she frantically summarized the occasionally illegible script. 

By the time Rey managed to tell Luke about the place she had been, about seeing Ben, he seemed markedly more convinced. Her summary of her vision of the Ahch-To cave had him brimming with curiosity, like a scholar she had tantalized with the promise of a remarkable new discovery. It mingled with what Rey felt was reflected on her own face: hope that they would see that boy they loved again. 

“Do you know how to get back?” Luke asked, studying the delicate geometric patterns of the Aionomica’s first theorem with reverence. 

Rey shook her head. “The first time it was an accident.” Her voice was hushed and hurried, as if Luke was a conspirator. “I’m not even sure the vision of Ahch-To was the same place.”

Luke nodded, thoughtful. “No,” he finally agreed. “But they seem connected...” 

He drifted over to Rey’s utility shelf, plucking the text that Rey immediately recognized as the most ancient from the pile. She had abandoned the study of it altogether, the text not only being far too faded, but the language within it entirely lost to time. 

Luke flipped through it as if it was written in standard basic. 

When he waved her over, however, she realized that he was searching for something specific, something he had likely studied before. When he had found the page he needed, his hand settled on it like the slightest disturbance would cause the text to crumble underneath the pads of his fingertips. 

Rey recognized the symbol that was etched there. She recognized its variation, at least. Instead of one figure, half light, half dark, the Prime Jedi symbol that she had seen so many times in the temple on Ahch-To was now three: Dark, Light, and a tension. A balance. 

The text beneath it had a translation. The sacredness with which Luke read it was the only indication she needed in order to know that this was the only legible script within the entire book. 

_These are the Ones, the eternal, the Force itself._

Rey nearly laughed. “Yes, well, that clears it up.” She tried to refrain from letting too much frustration color her words.

He still stared at it, as if he expected the text to unveil itself, suddenly alive after thousands of years of obsolescence.

“The Nightsisters worship them,” he managed, as if piecing together a millenia old puzzle. “Living manifestations of the Force.”

“There are three of them?” Rey queried, studying the triadic symbol again, now more curious. 

“They call them the Twin Spirits: the Light and the Dark.” He pointed to the figures at the forefront. “The Winged Goddess and the Fanged God…” he murmured. “Constantly in tension.”

His fingers drifted to the third figure. “And the Father - the balance.” 

“There were only two,” she interrupted. “In the vision.” 

“Yes,” Luke said, considering her thoughtfully. When he finally spoke again, he addressed his words to the symbol on the page. 

“Some early interpretations of the Prime Jedi figure hypothesized that the balance was kept by two. One mostly light, one mostly dark, but also with a self-contained balance.”

“Like the symbol on Ahch-To!” Rey added, delighted that her earlier connection was not unfounded. 

Luke confirmed her observation with a soft, wistful smile, nearly the teacher she should have had. 

“But later Jedi scholars rejected this, understanding the Force as a dual tension: all light, and all dark.” 

That is surely what those two had been. There was no trace of light in the man that she had seen- no darkness in the woman, either. 

“So the later Jedi were right, then?” Rey concluded, anticipating that Luke must have made this connection as well. 

Yet he didn’t seem sure. “Perhaps. But then they fell... unable to trust a padawan torn between the two.” The shadow of regret fell over his features. “Like I was.” 

Rey nearly reached out to comfort him before she realized she could not, that Luke was immaterial, and she stood alone in this world. Suddenly they both seemed rather pitiful. 

But Rey had not survived for this long with such little hope in the world to give up now, with happiness to clearly within her reach. 

“We’ll get him back,” she whispered, sympathy finding its place in hushed tones. 

Luke seemed comforted by it. The wan smile he gave her was one of complete faith, which she automatically did not know that she deserved. 

“I’m sure you will.”

***

Rey was no stranger to managing the impossible through sheer force of will. She had lost count of her scrapes with death, all but one avoided, and surely each were more trying than kriffing _meditating_. 

She had settled on the floor of her makeshift living quarters hours ago, folded limbs arranged in determination. She suspected that her lack of success was related to the fact that she had genuinely felt _excited_ , nearly giddy with the prospect of change. 

The frigid, creeping presence of doubt began to take hold by sunset. Meditation didn’t seem to be working; she didn’t even know if meditation would take her to the place where she had seen Ben. Even as the twin suns fell behind the horizon, she refused to abandon her work. She could feel the air’s temperature rapidly dropping around her, the faint evening breeze growing icy. 

Eventually, she began to trace the Aionomica’s delicate geometric patterns in her mind, almost in resignation, until her breathing became even and slow. 

When she opened her eyes, she suspected that she had fallen asleep. She felt that distancing heaviness that she had come to associate with it, like she had left her body and drowned in it all at once. And like he was in her dreams, Ben was there. 

She could see him limping ahead of her, carrying himself forward as if being dragged by an invisible force down the hallway that stretched ahead of her. Despite its changed appearance, she knew this was the same place she had seen him last, the world between worlds where she had interrupted his prayer. There were no other passage ways this time; only one hallway, infinite and determined in its singularity. The only thing that remained were whispers - and Ben. 

When she shouted his name, he did not look back at her. She didn’t know if he could even hear her, but she did know that this was a man possessed with intent. The way he lurched forward in staccato bursts made her strongly suspect that his leg was broken. Still, he put his weight on it in a bid to move forward, away from her. 

Or toward, she realized with a feeling that felt like falling, her stomach dropping. Her body was there, cold and limp at the end of the hallway beyond a now-visible threshold that separated she and Ben’s past selves from where she stood. Her corpse was laid in front of her, and for a moment she felt like the one who was truly dead. 

She knew how this would play out. But it felt like a particularly cruel torture to have to watch it unfold. 

Ben took his last few feet to her crawling before pulling her up into him by her hanging arm. She could see him stumbling for a pulse, and then confirming that it was absent. 

It was just as well that she couldn’t bear to watch anymore; the tears in her eyes obscured her view regardless. 

She knew when Ben had brought her back from her soft whisper of recognition. It was strange to share space with herself. She fought back her tears enough for her vision to clear by the time she saw Ben collapse. 

The next few moments passed with the kind of blur that comes from adrenaline and desperation. She wasn’t sure how she managed to summon the strength necessary to conceal herself in the Force, a future shade, hiding from herself; but by the time she reached the two figures intertwined on the floor of that pit, she accepted trust in it. 

She pulled Ben away from herself with a grunt of effort that she assumed would go unheard. The moment was a rather macabre mirror of itself. One Rey losing, the other gaining. Ben passed between two worlds. She very nearly felt responsible for the Rey opposite her, now huddled over nothing, almost folding in on herself. She soothed the guilt with the comfort that she was fixing the source of that pain.

She managed to carry Ben across the threshold between muscles toned over years of effort and help from the Force. The man himself was no help, limp and pliable against her shoulders. She would have thought him dead if it weren’t for his steady heartbeat against hers, just like in her dreams, still very much alive. 

When she reached the hallway, whispers still inhabiting the air like smoke, she let Ben collapse from her hold. He spilled across the floor with a satisfying thud, but the sound itself could not satiate her that he was really there, concrete, flesh and blood and _Ben_. Her hands moving over him grew more insistent with each possible confirmation of life. At the steady flutter of a heartbeat under her palms, she pressed rocking searches into his chest. At the brush of his breath on her fingers, she put bruising queries into his jawline. 

_Wake up._

_Wake up._

“Wake up!” She finally managed, her voice sounding hoarse and thick, but still loud enough to drown out the whispers around them that were growing more and more insistent. 

Ben’s breath was heavy and deep with sleep, exhaustion borne from an effort that should have killed him. _Perhaps it did_ , Rey thought. _But at least this time she had died with him_. They were here together in this place, after all. 

When his eyes started to flicker open in response to her insistent prodding, her relief was quickly drowned with rage. 

She hit his chest again, much harder this time than her nudging. He was frustratingly unyielding, all skin and muscle. This man knew better than anyone her fears of solitude, and he had ignored them.

“You kriffing _idiot_!” She hissed, as Ben features fully emerged from his drowsiness. He looked frozen, meek almost, his face arranged in the blankness of startled prey. 

He automatically grasped her thrashing arms, gathering them to him in a gesture that was more self-defense than an embrace. She ruefully hoped she wasn’t beating on any broken or bruised ribs. 

She was ready to apologize before he let out a startled laugh, his head collapsing back to the floor. 

“Are we dead then?” he breathed, and his voice was so resigned and destitute that her anger evaporated immediately. 

Rey shifted herself so that she could see his face, her own mouth twisting in accusatory confusion. 

“You think that’s funny?” 

When he looked back at her, it was with the same hope that he had moments before- at least moments before for _Ben_ \- when she had kissed him, chasing off the last vestiges of death. That moment felt a lifetime ago to Rey, who had suffered her fair share since. 

“No,” he said, almost as a question. His head lolled slightly as he turned his eyes to meet hers. “I just expected a worse afterlife for myself.” 

His eyes turned soft as they drifted over her face, as if trying to memorize it. They wandered for a moment before they darkened, now tinged with sadness and something like regret. His hand drifted up to her hair lazily, tangling itself in one of her buns. “But I expected a better one for you.” 

It was Rey’s turn to laugh now. “We’re not dead Ben,” she said, slowly allowing her lips to twist into a smile. “We keep rescuing each other,” she huffed out, almost annoyed, but finally letting the full delight of her success begin to settle. As if saying it aloud would make it fully true. 

She was still not sure how to bring them back, after all.

Ben’s mouth grew pouty, nearly petulant at Rey’s assertion, and he finally cast his gaze away from her, taking in the hallway around them. 

“Where are we then?” he queried, sounding skeptical. Rey would be the first to admit that it was otherworldly. The hallway was dark, stretching on in iterative and infinite emptiness. The whispers were beginning to press in on them insistently, too thick to make out any words. 

“An inbetween place,” she answered. “It connects time - it brought me to you before, once. You thought I was a dark side vision.” 

She saw the slight glint of recognition, accompanied with a small nod of acceptance. There would be more time for explanation, later. 

“How do we get out?” As he looked around, his hair fell into his face. Rey wondered how he could look so similar and alien all at once. This was unquestionably no longer the boy ravaged by darkness that she had fought on Star Killer. Yet he looked the same. 

“We walk, I suppose,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it. 

Her hand wandered to his leg, probing with the Force to find the injury. The bone wasn’t fully broken, but it sported a fairly significant fracture. Regardless, it only took a few focused moments to heal. 

“Can you walk?” She said, pulling herself to her feet and extending an arm to him. 

She thought his face looked pale at the prospect, but the nod he gave in confirmation was determined enough for her to ignore it. She pulled him up with a grunt, and they turned together to face the infinite passage, resolved to find a way home together.

Except this time, it was not infinite. 

There, at the end, were the two that Rey had mistaken for a reflection. They seemed to make no effort to conceal themselves now, switching like a mirror catching the light between what Rey assumed were their true forms and an imitation of Rey and Ben. 

The whispers around them ceased, coalescing into a silence belonging to them: twin spirits, vast and eternal, all light and dark. 

The woman stepped forward, mouth that was not-quite-Rey’s curling in recognition. She raised her hand and urged them forward. She was looking at Ben the same way that her shadow had looked at Rey - like she would devour him, a prize received at long last. 

“Let’s see him, then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Holidays! Hope you enjoy the update.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check the changes to the tags! I hope you all enjoy this last chapter. It was so fun to write and all of your encouragement has been so lovely and motivating. x

For someone with as little knowledge of what-in-the-living-Force was happening, Ben was decidedly calm. 

The woman approached Ben like he was a curiosity, casually dropped at her feet by some devoted servant. Rey supposed that was meant to be her, although that was hardly what she intended. 

Ben eyed the woman warily, occasionally casting more distrustful glances to the man that remained skulking in the background, considerably more ominous, watching from the shadows. He looked less like Ben than ever, his eyes shifting between an inhuman black and burnt amber. 

It made her blood run cold. 

When the woman made an attempt to touch Ben’s face, Rey nearly felt the urge to intervene. She doubted the woman would harm him - manifest light that she was - but the way she approached him felt too clinical for Rey’s taste. 

Mercilessly, her hand fell just short of his cheek. 

“So this is what the Force has wrought,” she murmured, thoughtful. Her voice echoed in the emptiness of the void, surrounding them from all sides, as if it was coming from the fabric of this place. 

Ben merely stared back, still casting occasional glances at the man in the corner that grew increasingly more threatening. When he looked to Rey, in askance, she shook her head.

She had no doubt the idiot would fight the Force itself if she wanted him to. She also had no intention of letting that happen. 

“You’re the Ones, aren’t you?’ Rey asked, directing the question to both figures. Her voice, single and solitary, sounded peculiar next to theirs. 

The woman smiled with a sweet sort of regret. “Only two of them,” she replied. “I am Daughter.” 

She offered no introduction to the shade behind her, who had now drifted to face Rey. 

Daughter shifted her gaze back to Ben, managing to somehow look _down_ at him from her lower position. 

“You’re the dyad, then?” It was addressed to Ben alone. 

“Yes.” His response was still terse, increasingly weary and anticipatory. 

“You gave your life to her…” Daughter whispered, recognizing something in her gaze. “As I once did, for another…” She was surprised, and a thoughtfulness crept into her study of Ben.

Ben did not answer her. He continued to shoot furtive looks to the corner. Rey could not blame him, not after the life he had lived - haunted by an array of ever present dark figures like this one.

“Why do you choose to look like us?” Rey asked, still uncomfortable with Daughter’s scrutiny. It managed to distract, and Daughter’s gaze shifted from Ben to Rey. For a moment, she thought she could see Daughter’s full self, all vestiges of Rey stripped away. Loose hair tumbled over the sweeping robes that Rey had come to associate with ceremony and aristocracy. She struggled to understand why she would choose to appear as anything else.

“We all come from the same source,” she said, her voice continuing to press down from every direction. “We fulfill the same need.”

“One could say we _are_ the same,” said the man in front of Rey, finally deciding to speak. His voice made the air run cold in a way that Daughter’s did not. 

“We are both the Force, manifest,” Daughter said, replying to the man cooly. “But we are not the same.” Her voice was judicious now, in stark contrast to how she had evaluated Rey when they had first met.

_You are not the same as I._

Daughter looked between them, skeptical. “Perhaps you are us, and the Balance as well.” 

Rey thought of the Prime Jedi symbol, swirls of light and dark: two figures made of both, in balance with each other. 

Rey could feel Ben’s unease through the bond, which grew too insistent to ignore when that dark shadow of Ben began to approach her. 

The real Ben lurched forward in an apparent attempt to intervene, his intent briefly registering across the bond. Rey began to cry out in an effort to stop him, which merely transformed into one of protest as Ben tumbled to the floor, asleep. 

Daughter peered down at him in satisfaction as Rey stumbled over to him, crouching down to check his breathing.

“He’s merely asleep,” Daughter said, waving her hand as if to brush away Rey’s impending complaints. “With you,” she adds with a smile, peering inside his head. Rey remembered all the nights that she had dreamed with Ben, wondering if he was a vision. Daughter’s observance of their shared time started to feel increasingly like an invasion.

“He is much too weak to be brought from this place, regardless. If you want him to return, he’ll need my attention,” she said, looking at him with something approaching fondness. 

“That is what you would like, Rey?” Daughter asked, turning her study to the girl crouching above him. 

That _was_ what she wanted, more than anything. She managed a tight nod in affirmation. 

“You’ll really let that happen?” The man interrupted, voice sliding over the two of them, like night approaching, taunting and inevitable. The words were addressed to Daughter, but they were intended to hurt Rey. “They both have so much _darkness_.” He said it as if it were delectable- that their freedom was a welcome prize for him. 

As if Ben had kept him at bay, the man finally approached Rey, his movements stealthy. Rey had the distinct feeling of being hunted. 

He crouched near her and Ben, peering at her like she was contained in a cage. 

“This one is angry,” he said, a smile briefly contorting his features. “Lonely. Distrusting the Force. She was prepared to defy it to end that solitude.”

Rey had known enough of the dark side to recognize the tone he used. It was knowing - throwing her own weaknesses and doubts back at her. He was testing the cracks in her armour, attempting to pry his way in. 

Rey mustered an expression she hoped was threatening. “Loving someone isn’t darkness,” she hissed, throwing the words at him like punches. 

For Rey, the words felt like a revelation. She had chastised herself for the same things in meditation that this man had taunted her for now. But she had never been more convinced of anything. Wasn’t that how Ben had brought her back?

Perhaps it was neither darkness or light. Or perhaps it had the capacity for both.

The Ones did not look so convinced. 

When the Daughter spoke, Rey had the impression she was giving up her judgment, trusting in something that was larger than her infiniteness. The man looked like he saw an opportunity - one that he was happy to let go unnoticed by his counterpart. 

“We shall see.”

Their decision was seemingly reached, and everything went black.

When Rey woke, it felt like she had not rested at all. The immediacy of the events in the world between worlds was tangible. She could nearly hear the Daughter’s voice pressing in around her, and the clarity of her judgement felt as fresh as a few seconds ago. 

Yet it clearly could not have been so recent. Rey was not where she had been meditating, but rather wrapped in her standard issue blanket, lying on the cot she had slept in every night since she arrived on Tatooine. 

And she was alone. 

The panic that filled her chest felt like suffocation, tight and deadly. 

She had only managed one shuddering breath before Ben Solo came stumbling through her door, cursing under his breath and huffing. 

It took just as long for the panic to subside as it had to appear, especially at the sight of a dripping Ben, tangible and real, before her in her waking hours. He must have been using the fresher; his hair was dripping rivulets of precious water onto the same dirt and blood stained clothes he had worn to Exegol. 

That water had been hard earned over the course of months, and Rey could not manage an iota of anger. Here was her other half, alive, literally barrelling into her life again. 

“Kriffing _hell_ Rey,” he said, his hand pressed to his heart like he was attempting to keep it contained in his chest. Rey imagined that her panic was probably not the most pleasant thing to feel through the bond since he woke, but his face softened in forgiveness at the sight of her sitting on the edge of their bed, smiling. 

Seeing him so close, immediate, with no enemy to face and no animosity between them made her feel suddenly awkward. These were not the stolen moments after her death on Exegol. There was no desperate swallowing of their time together. 

Here they both stood, presumably facing infinity. 

“Jumpy?” She teased, knowing full well that it was her fear that had sparked his. 

He shrugged, mouth quirked in resignation, happy to have her weakness shifted to him.

“You can hardly blame me,” he quipped back. “The last thing I remember someone who looked every Sith combined was about to lunge at you.” 

His eyes grew questioning, and he leaned against the entryway before he continued. “Did you fight him, then?” His voice carried the same playful tone that his teasing had earlier - surely she had not fought the living manifestation of the dark side and won - but she thought she detected a kernel of sincerity underneath. 

She shook her head in response, growing somber at the memory of what had happened. 

“No, they both... let us come back.” She swallowed heavily before continuing. “I think they’re letting us make a balance for ourselves.”

His face was too open, and she thought she caught a flickering instability in the set of his mouth and searching gaze. 

She knew that he could sense her discomfort, and he leaned into it, carefully walking towards her as if to test how far he could go before he made her snap. She’s reminded of their first moments in the force bond, intimate and unfamiliar, struggling to find a new way of _being_ with each other.

Ben stopped before he reached her, slightly distant.

He lifted his hand out, in askance, for what she knew would be the last time. 

She nearly cried at the sight of that hand, bare and open, like it had been on Ahch-To.

She took it, and she turned his palm over gently. He became sweet and molten in an instant, previously all stoney coolness, prepared for a rejection. She felt like she could break him this way, delicate and supplicative. His face was turned down, mouth slightly pouty, focused where she’s holding his palm preciously. 

He stared at their hands, fascinated, as if the cradle she had formed for him is some profound discovery. His brows creased together. “I…” They were close enough that she could nearly feel the coolness of his skin, still slightly damp and clean. “I don’t know if I deserve this, Rey.”

He met her gaze as if looking for an answer. He looked so lost, desperate for something from her. The sense of recognition that Rey felt was overwhelming. 

He’s the only person with which she never feels alone - a reflection. 

She brought her lips to his stubbornly, in answer, fingers tangling in inky hair to tug him down to her. His mouth was pliant and soft at first, and he bent himself to her, hands floating around her face and torso as if he expected her to break away from him. 

And then something snapped, as if he had become lucid - waking from a haze. Suddenly he was everywhere - hands cradling her face, pulling her to him to subsume her. Her lips opened in a gasp, and he pressed the advantage of it, his mouth turning fierce and searching, breath mingling. They were tangled together now, bodies reaching and pulling, and for a moment Rey deliriously wished they could swallow each other - a reflection of two merging into one, no longer alone. 

Her back pressed into a wall, and Ben hovered over her, his kiss still frenzied and rich. Her senses felt thick - like she was floating - simultaneously heightened and dampened, time stretching and blurring. Ben’s mouth traveled from hers to her neck, lingering and sucking fumbling kisses into her skin. He seemed almost unaware of what he was doing again; his movements were dreamlike, as if he had done this a thousand times. 

The moan that escaped her when his tongue made contact with the delicate skin of her neck startled him, and he pulled away with a gasp. It felt like she had been suddenly pulled from the water after she had been comfortably drowning, but the moment still retained a dreamlike quality to it. 

Ben was looking at her like his heart was breaking. His mouth was swollen and red. “I didn’t think I’d ever get to do that again.” 

Their breath was loud in the silence, still both at a loss of air from their kiss. 

She let her hand linger on his face, where his scar had been. The unspoken reply rested in the silence between them, so alienly happy that the words felt too delicate to be voiced aloud. 

They had all the time in the world to be with each other, now. 

When her lips met his again, they were soft and searching, and Ben let Rey lead. She felt a reservation in him, as if he still did not know her limits and was restraining from pushing them too far. 

She interrupted their kiss to tug his shirt up with shaking hands, and she nearly expected him to pull away from her. But he complied, lifting his arms obediently, his eyes not straying too far from her face. He showed just as little embarrassment as the first time she had seen him like this, decidedly unbothered by her wandering gaze. His disheveled, still slightly damp hair spilled ribbons onto the pale expanse of skin and muscle of his shoulders and chest. When their lips met again, growing hot and searching each second that they continued, she was suddenly very aware of how much larger he was than her. How gentle he was now, despite the quiet threat of the sloping tone to his arms. 

Ben’s hands remained everywhere and nowhere - they flitted between wrapping themselves in her increasingly disheveled buns and curling around the side of her neck or the small of her waist. She groaned in frustration as they pointedly ignored where she would like them to be, finally pulling his palm beneath her wrapped tunic with eager hands. 

Ben emitted a quiet sigh when the skin of his fingers brushed against her bare nipple, and it lit Rey’s blood on fire. Everywhere his hands trailed left burning- her cheek, her ribs, her stomach. When his hands found the inside of her thigh, it was all-consuming, sending delicious licks of heat into her stomach that made her feel desperate for _something_ \- she longed for him to be closer, to kiss her harder, for them to _break_ each other.

Rey nearly tore her wrappings in her haste to get them off, and Ben watched enraptured, parted lips red and kiss-swollen, like he was witnessing something holy. By the time she had tossed them aside, Ben had collapsed on their cot, looking up at her reverently. His hands on the bare skin of her torso felt obscene, feather light and warm, covering far too much of her body. When he took her nipple in his mouth, sucking gently, rolled between plush lips in devotion, Rey had the feeling of being worshiped - as if Ben was asking for salvation. 

Perhaps he was. 

He had said he did not deserve this. Rey did not have the power to forgive his sins - but she knew that she forgave each one against her long ago.

When she pushed him down to her bed, much too small to comfortably fit both of them, she took a moment to press searching kisses over the slopes of his torso. His skin was cool, smooth - unmarred by the scars they had given each other. 

Healed. 

When he groaned, helpless beneath her, dark hair spilled over searing, hungry eyes in _her_ bed, she felt heady and powerful and finally _alive_ again. The center of her was pressed against Ben’s stomach, and she could feel her heart beating there - steady and radiating. 

Ben groaned again when she dragged herself along the length of him, slow and tortuous. His hands flew to her waist to lead her, moving together in hungry, consuming waves of motion that was mediated by their shared breath.

Ben quickly grew impatient, writhing under her and chasing her kisses with his tongue, and Rey gasped when he spun her body beneath him as effortlessly as drawing air. When Rey lifted her hips, he peeled her trousers away roughly, pausing for a moment to devour the sight of her. Rey was the one who felt helpless now - huddled under a man twice her size - accepting the stinging, bruising kisses he placed along her neck and earlobe with muffled whimpers.

When Ben rolled into her, she arched against him and moaned, clinging to the bare skin of his back.

They would leave new marks on each other, now.

She let out a small noise of complaint when his lips broke away from hers, only to tangle her fingers in his hair as his mouth moved down her body, nipping at bare skin as he hovered over her. He pressed warm, lingering kisses in his descent - to her ribs, the hollow of her stomach, the stretch of her tailbone. When his tongue grazed the inside of her thigh, she felt delirious, desperate for him to still the ache between her thighs. She squirmed in an attempt to encourage him, and she caught the wolfish grin of his reply as he peered up at her between parted legs. His breath came in slow and heavy puffs against her as his hands went to steady her, draping one leg over his shoulder and placing his palm against her stomach. 

She knew why as soon as his lips met her body, sending a shockwave through her that made her writhe involuntarily. Ben held her steady, his mouth coaxing her higher, eliciting his name from her in breathy moans.

When she came apart under his mouth, she believed that she would be happy again.

When she came apart on his cock, Ben's orgasm chasing hers with their names on each others lips, she believed that he could be too.

_***_

They both knew they would not stay on Tatooine.

This was where one came to die. To bury. To hide.

They were both too _alive_ for that now.

Ben initially took the pilot’s seat of the _Millenium Falcon_ with a silent reverence. He paused to skim the pads of his fingers over the hyperspace lever and the frayed fabric, somber and lost in memory.

It was grief, of a sort. 

When he put the ship into lightspeed, his mourning was replaced by an elation so boyish it brought a startled laugh from Rey’s throat.

She wondered if he was allowed to do that much, as a child.

They were making up for lost time when the blue planet replaced the steady glow of hyperspace. Rey took the pilot seat to fly them down to the island.

She was excited to show it to Ben. Perhaps she would share it with others too, at some point. She liked the idea of teaching - especially with Ben at her side. 

Ben pressed a kiss to her hair when she had finished the landing sequence. The descent had been smooth- the rain typical for this place was nowhere to be seen, the brilliant green of Ahch-To even more vibrant in the sunlight. 

It could rain tomorrow.

There would be what they had.

A balance.


	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I was bored and wrote an epilogue. I got locked out of my twitter account and I'm VERY sad about it, so please follow me at my new star wars account, @slidingsoxs . I'm also going to repost a reylo fic that I did post-TLJ and never finished, and actually get around to it this time. SO if you would like to read that, you can subscribe to my profile or check back here in the next week.

Between the caretakers, Rey and Ben, and a few reluctant padawans, it didn’t take much to coax Ahch-To into a _home_. The stone huts on the cliffside were plenty insulated - and with a cot instead of a stone bench to sleep on they cultivated enough space for the near-fifteen inhabitants to live sheltered from the elements. 

Rey and Ben shared a hut, of course. Rey had cried, sloppily and happily, when Ben had easily picked out the one in which they had held hands a lifetime ago. It looked different now, bigger since the caretakers had rebuilt it, but something of their old selves still lingered. 

When they first arrived, Ben had moved through the rest of the island with his lips pouting in the way she had come to know meant he was holding back tears. He bit them back as he went through Luke’s belongings, slightly disordered and lived-in. They broke when they found Han’s dice, resting gently in the temple where Luke had died. 

They had held each other until they felt healed, sharing the weight of the pain, soothing with brushing fingers and knowing whispers. There was no force ability to do that work, but it felt all the same regardless, giving pieces of each other until they felt whole again. 

The next day, Ben healed the kyber hanging in Luke’s hut. When he finally ignited the blade he had cobbled together from stray parts they had picked up in the nearest trade port, it glowed white - only the faintest blue tinge coloring the glow. 

The island had changed very little since then, apart from the considerably more comfortable living quarters and new faces. The caretakers had warmed to Rey too, which she suspected was largely due to Ben and his insistence that he and the other padawans help maintain the island’s upkeep as part of daily training. 

Most of them had readily obliged, making games and giggling over stacking stones and catching fish in the shallow pools on the craggy shoreline. The noise would drift up the cliffs to Rey and Ben in the morning, slightly muffled by the gale and the porgs’ twittering. 

To Rey, it always felt like seeing rain for the first time. 

The only student who had objected to chores was a little girl they had rescued together from a slaver in Cantonica, whose skinny little arms made her look much younger than the nine years she had dutifully reported along with her name. Dira had followed Ben around for the first several days on the island, stricken, moony grey eyes tracking him under a childish brush of freckles. Rey had laughed at his unease with it, altogether uncomfortable with the attention. She still teased him when they were alone together, when the sun fell beneath the waves and the cliffs, about his _favorite student_ that he was too stubborn to admit he had a soft spot for. 

Given her infatuation with Ben, they were both surprised when Dira had lashed out at his proposal to aid with chores - stubbornly knocking over a cart of stones with the force. Rey had trusted Ben to deal with it, carefully herding the others off to the shoreline with playful ribbing at the sandy haired brothers that were their most energetic students, closer to Rey’s age than the youngest of the bunch.

Ben had started taking Dira and a few others to the cave underneath the island after that, brushing Rey’s queries off with knowing smiles and distracting kisses at the curve of her neck or slope of her stomach. When he finally caved to her prodding, he had sighed and smiled. 

“She reminds me of you,” he said, eyes softening. “Growing up with nothing - still clinging to goodness in spite of it.”

The kisses to her bare stomach grew slower as he thought. 

“But she is like me, too. It’s just a feeling I have - she and the others, they need this.” 

He and looked up at her with such pleading certainty and softness that she had trusted him blindly. 

A few weeks later, to her delight, Dira had joined them at the shore with Ben in tow, seamlessly blending into the other children’s routine. The smile Ben had given her was soft and knowing, and the one she returned was proud. 

Dira had waddled up to her after the others had left, hands slightly red from the cold water that she was wiping off with her tunic. Her eyes remained downcast, eyelashes meeting freckled cheeks as she mumbled shyly to Rey. 

“Master Solo says that you grew up like me, on Jakku.” The way she said it had broken Rey’s heart - as if she was offering up this similarity as the only way of Rey understanding. 

Rey took a cold, damp hand as she settled on the rocks, waves lapping at their feet. The gesture granted Rey a pair of eyes angled up from a face finally beginning to round out from regular meals, cheeks whipped red by the wind. 

“Probably not _exactly_ like you, Dira. But I think similar.” 

Rey’s hand soothed over smaller fingers. Dira’s eyes wandered back to her feet, shy again. 

“Then maybe you know why I didn’t want to do chores,” her voice came out in a guilty whisper.

Rey nodded, throat growing tight, and pulled the little girl to her in a hug. 

“Yes, I understand.” 

She held her for a little while, after Dira’s little arms reached around her hesitantly, and just let the words be enough, the ocean breeze blowing Dira’s hair into her face.   
When she pulled back, Rey gave her an encouraging smile. Dira had always been shy around her. 

“How are your lessons with Ben?” 

She let the unasked linger in the air - questions about dark and light, and maybe a struggle between the two. 

Dira, at all but ten, seemed knowing. 

“They’re good,” she said, lips pursing in a childish quirk. “It’s easier for me than the temple, but I don’t really _like_ it more,” she said, referring to the lessons Rey would give on the temple at the peak of the island. 

The girl paused for a moment, the silence filled with the slosh of waves. It seemed like she was trying to articulate something, but couldn’t quite find the words. 

Rey was the one to break the silence, thinking of Ben, who had led the rest of the padawans halfway up the mountain by now. 

_She’s also like me, too_ , he had said. 

“Perhaps for some people, it’s easier to find the light in dark places,” Rey finished, squeezing the girl’s arm in understanding. 

All of the students began to spend time with Ben underneath the island, in time. Some took easier to it than others. Hardly any approached that cave with the abandon that Rey had, longing for answers and facing nagging wounds that propelled her to that mirror. 

They each faced it gradually. Prepared. Guided.

Rey thought it was appropriate that Ben was the one to do it. He was the one that had done it for her, after all, quietly accepting her frustration and pain through the force bond. 

Rey would be there to guide them above ground. Quiet and compatible collaborators, each filling a need for each other, and for the students who relied on them. 

When Rey and Ben saw Luke again, he seemed proud. 

“You both are much better teachers than I ever was,” he had said, chagrin replaced by humor. 

Ben had frozen up at the praise, and Rey smiled at his reticence. 

There was still an awkwardness between them, the one that comes from two people who love each other and have not quite yet healed. One that Rey knew would fade with time. 

When Rey returned to Yavin, a trip of necessity in addition to recreation, Finn had stared at her with such unnerving focus that she nearly squirmed where she sat on crates underneath the ship where he, Poe, Rose, and Jannah worked. 

They dedicated their time in a similar way to Rey now, passing on what they had learned, liberating former First Order troops and slaves in the Outer Rim. Finn would always recognize anyone force sensitive, who he would readily escort to Ahch-To. 

She didn’t want to tell him about Ben yet, so he never stayed too long. 

“You seem different,” he had said, searching for the admission she wasn’t ready to give. 

She grinned at him. 

“I’m happy,” she replied, reassuring as much as it was certain. 

He had stared at her still, unwilling to admit that was the whole truth of it. 

She was more _whole_ than happy, at balance, each part of herself reconciled and known. 

And it would be the joy of her life to maintain that within herself. To pass it on to others. And to share it, with Ben.

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy the fix it fic. I don't address the Palpatine stuff cause I hate it. If I ever reference parents in text, its the one's who sold her off for drinking money.


End file.
